I Lived In A Dryer For A Week To Raise Awareness For Our Clothes, by Gwenyth Paltrow

Last week, actor (and cool dude) Leo DiCaprio challenged me to raise awareness for the Clothing Kindly Project by trying to survive in a dryer for a week to simulate when poor people place a load of laundry in their dryer but forget to activate it on account of being destitute. Incredibly uncertain that I could complete this challenge, I donated three mansions worth of clothes to various vintage thrift stores throughout Brooklyn, and then everyone here at the goop office began to vigorously document the challenge to raise social media awareness for goop and myself.

Here’s my dryer. Feeling cramped yet?

As I had anticipated the immediate moment that the idea was incepted into my brain by Leo (and the rest of his Pussy Posse, incidentally), I failed shortly after the challenge began, when, after three minutes of imagining what it would be like to actually be in my Summit WMC64P, I decided to not participate in the experiment (and to be as translucent as a Larval Blenny Fish, I only agreed to this because my publicist told me to). My view on this world will never be the same. No damp clothes should have to sit for minutes, hours, or days in an unmoving dryer, but this is an unfortunate fact that nearly 50 million Americans face every day and all the time, everywhere, endlessly.

If one were to assign me a numeral or alphabetical grade on which to rate my performance so that I may be further validated as being both humble and not a failure, I would give myself a B+. Despite my incredibly acceptable grade considering the circumstances, I cannot begin to tell you how upset I am knowing that poor people — especially poor mothers — are tasked with a litany of tasky tasks with no help from their spouses, who often opt for secret, unconscious uncouplings, unbeknownst to their wives.

The way we couples couple in America needs to change drastically. According to statistics from the American Psychological Association, about 40–50% of married couples in America divorce. That means that almost half of our couples consciously uncouple, which doesn’t even take into account those poor couples who unconsciously do so! This is just downright wrong and it’s an issue that America needs to discuss. Well, that and the issue of washed clothes that end up smelling funky after sitting in the dryer for too long because someone forgot to turn it on.

I understand, like 100% of my readers do, that these issues likely don’t affect you and that you probably will never have the tiniest inkling of understanding of what it’s like to be so poor you don’t turn on your dryer or to be so poor you don’t even get married or to be so poor you unconsciously uncouple with your spouse. I get it. I mean, I don’t get those things I listed, but I get that you don’t and I don’t get it.

love, gp

Oh! I figured out how my publicist came up with the name for goop. It’s like just trying to pronounce the first letters of my first and last name together as one word. Fascinating.